Breaking News: Why Didn’t Stack Exchange Work? – with Joel Spolsky
Stack Overflow, the question and answer site for programmers, went from 0 to 6.5 million monthly unique visitors within 2 years. So the company launched a few related sites, which did well too. That’s when they decided to create Stack Exchange, a hosted question and answer platform that anyone (who has $125 per month) can run, about any topic they choose.
As you’ll hear in this interview with Joel Spolsky, the company’s co-founder, it didn’t work. Only 20-40 of the sites created had significant traffic. Many were ghost towns. In this interview, you’ll hear why Stack Exchange didn’t work. You’ll also hear why Stack Overflow raised money and the new direction they’re pursuing.
Joel Spolsky is the co-founder of Stack Overflow, a question and answer community. He’s also the co-founder of Fog Creek Software, the bootstrapped New York City-based software company. And, until recently, he wrote an influential blog about software development, called Joel on Software.
This interview is sponsored by Grasshopper, The virtual phone system that entrepeneuers love, because you can use your own phones and manage it on the web. Check out grasshopper.com. It’s also sponsored by Wufoo where you can go right now to get embeddable forms and surveys that you can add to your website for free, go to Wufoo.com. And it’s sponsored by shopify. When you go to shopify.com you can create a store within minutes and have all the support and features you need to make that store grow, check out shopify.com.
Here’s the program.
Hi, everyone its Andrew Warner founder of Mixergy.com. Home of the ambitious up start. I got a guy you are all familiar with Joel Sposkey , he is the co-founder of fondcreek and the co-founder of Stacks Exchange. Stacks Exchange is what we are going to be talking about today. It’s a question and answer platform. I built Mixergy’s question and answers site on the platform that Joel co-founded, Stacks...
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